U.S. Should Learn From China, Not Fear Its Rise: Jonathan Alter

Nov. 11 (Bloomberg) -- I had dinner this week in Beijing
with an elegant 85-year-old woman named He Liliang, who had one
of the great front-row seats to history.

Her late husband, Huang Hua, translated for the journalist
Edgar Snow when he conducted his famous interviews with Mao
Zedong in 1936. Her father was Mao’s teacher, and instructed him
in the work of Carl von Clausewitz, the German military
strategist best known for his maxim that “war is the extension
of politics by other means.”

Today’s surging China doesn’t seem interested in war or
politics, only economic growth. Huang’s son works in finance and
his daughter-in-law works for a Hollywood studio. His country,
undergoing one of the great transformations in human history,
should be a source of fascination and study for the U.S. -- not
fear.

Of course, some fear is understandable, especially with
occasional signs in the Chinese news media of increasing
nationalist chest-thumping. China already spends more on its
military than any country except the U.S., and is making no
apologies for modernizing it. The buildup “will be based on our
own concerns, not aimed at either relieving your concerns or
increasing them,” Major General Yunzhan Yao told me and four
other visiting American journalists.

I wasn’t buying Yunzhan’s claim that the military is still
in its “mechanization” phase and won’t begin its big push for an
“informationized military” until 2020 or so. But for now the
military technology gap between the U.S. and China remains huge.
On Nov. 5, we were allowed to visit a People’s Liberation Army
base outside Beijing. The Type 88 tanks we saw, built in the
1980s, looked like antiques.

No Cold War

Our reception on the base was friendly, as it was when
Admiral Mike Mullen, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, reviewed Chinese military maneuvers at a different
installation earlier this year. We toured the barracks and joked
with a colonel about whether the NBA had made Yao Ming too soft
for military service. The mood was much cheerier than when I’d
interviewed Red Army generals in Moscow in the 1980s. If a new
Cold War’s coming, we saw no sign of it.

Zhou Wenzhong, a former Chinese ambassador to the U.S.,
said that our military officers are exaggerating the threat from
China. “Deep down they know what’s going on but need an argument
in Congress” for big defense budgets, he told us.

That sounds about right. The U.S. defense budget of nearly
$700 billion is roughly six times as large as China’s and more
than twice the percentage of gross domestic product. Proposed
Pentagon cuts would do little to lessen that edge.

Dangerous Neighborhood

And it’s not as if China is overly preoccupied with the
U.S. It has territorial disputes with 10 of the 12 countries
that border it. “We have four nuclear neighbors,” says Wu Xinbo
of Fudon University, referring to India, North Korea, Pakistan
and Russia. “If you lived in China, you couldn’t sleep.”

Maybe not, but that still doesn’t explain the Sichuan-sized
chip on its shoulder, the result of its power growing faster
than its ability to manage it.

Fortunately, national pride has consistently taken a
backseat to economic growth. Deng Xiaoping, the founder of
today’s China, reduced the military’s share of the budget in the
1970s to concentrate on the latter. Major military modernization
didn’t begin until the 1990s, as the U.S. expanded its defense
ties with Taiwan.

The major hotspot nowadays is the South China Sea. After
incidents of what some called brutish Chinese behavior toward
foreign fishing vessels, the Obama administration, determined to
show that the U.S. is still a major Pacific power, has been
conducting naval maneuvers with countries such as Vietnam and
the Philippines.

“China is very upset because it feels the U.S. is taking
sides,” says Wu. “If the U.S. is concerned about nationalism,
what it’s doing in the South China Sea will only fuel it.”

A New Attitude

Although tensions in the sea have eased recently, they can
worsen at any time -- as they might over Taiwan, Tibet,
political dissidents, intellectual property, exchange rates or
any of the other familiar flash points of U.S.-China relations.

Those are predictable sources of irritation that will grow
and recede. What we don’t know yet is how the new crop of
Chinese leaders that takes office next year will handle their
dramatically enhanced status on the world stage.

I talked to a senior Chinese policy analyst about the new
attitude. He had always heard that money talks, he said, but now
it seems that all of China’s money still doesn’t let it get a
word in edgewise at the International Monetary Fund and other
global forums. He compared the U.S. to the Qing Dynasty, which
he said had the highest GDP in the world but collapsed a century
ago because it grew complacent and failed to reform. His
critique of the U.S.’s failure to get its act together on issues
like education and budget deficits was accurate, but startling
in its intensity. We learn from you, he said, but you think you
have no need to learn anything from us.

Lawyers, Not Soldiers

And yet like the other sophisticated analysts we met, he
showed no sign of thinking the military can solve political
problems. He argued that China has benefited so much from
international institutions that it has zero interest in
disrupting them or jeopardizing all its accomplishments by
threatening world peace. Problems should be solved by lawyers,
he says, not soldiers.

Happily for the world, the “other means” for extending
politics has so far meant economic competition and integration,
not Clausewitz’s war. Being vigilant doesn’t mean that we always
have to assume warlike intentions on the part of other major
powers. When China’s top general, Chen Bingde, visited the
National Defense University in Washington in May, he quoted
Franklin D. Roosevelt: “The only thing we have to fear is fear
itself.”

That’s good advice for both countries.

(Jonathan Alter is a Bloomberg View columnist and the
author of “The Promise: President Obama, Year One.” The opinions
expressed are his own.)